Why Do You Always End Up With the Large?
Imagine standing in front of the PVR counter, still half-distracted from finding your seat. The flashing light of the menu board blinds your eyes and you see above you are three sizes of popcorn, each with a photo that makes even the small look way more than just that. Small: ₹180. Medium: ₹280. Large: ₹310. Your eyes squint. Wait, that can't be right you think . Thirty rupees more and you get the giant tub? You weren't even planning to spend on anything. But now doing mental math, before you know it you hear yourself say “large, please.”
This isn't a "coincidence". Multiscreen cinema chains such as INOX and PVR now merged into PVR INOX have spent years maximising their pricing. Food and beverage revenue contributes roughly 25–30% of a cinema's total revenue. Therefore, making it second only to ticket sales and exceeding advertising income significantly. The goal is simple: get people who were never going to spend much to spend significantly more not through pressure, but by making the more expensive option feel like the logical, and even responsible, choice.
Two concepts from this course explain exactly what happens in your mind at that counter.
The first is anchoring. The small popcorn at ₹180 becomes the base point or the anchor the moment your eyes land on it. Where everything else gets judged to that relative number. So when you see the large at ₹310, your brain doesn't think "that's expensive" it thinks "that's only ₹130 more than the small." The actual price becomes almost irrelevant. What matters is the gap; PVR INOX has carefully set that gap to feel small.
The second is the decoy effect which sits right inside the framing concept we covered. The medium at ₹280 isn't really meant to be bought. It exists only to make the large look like a steal. When you compare medium to large, you're getting barely 10% more money for what feels like twice the popcorn. The medium is deliberately undervalued on size so that your System 1 brain-the fast, automatic, one flags it as a bad deal. You feel like you'd be losing out if you didn't take the large. That feeling of missing a deal is loss aversion working in real life. You're not choosing the large because you're hungry, you're choosing it because not choosing it feels like a mistake.
It works almost everywhere globally. PVR INOX reported food and beverage revenue of over ₹1,200 crore in FY24, with per-head spends consistently rising year after year. You only need to observe a movie queue to see it; the large tub is by far the most common item walking toward the screens. I've watched this happen with my own family. My father, who genuinely did not want popcorn, ended up buying the large because, and I'm quoting him here, "it seemed wasteful not to." That sentence is basically a textbook definition of the decoy effect working perfectly.
If I were redesigning one thing, I'd reprice the medium to ₹230 and give it a slightly larger size which breaks the above decoy. Then suddenly, the medium becomes attractive, and the large stops looking like the more obvious choice. I'd predict the large share of sales drops to 40% from its current dominance and medium picks up. Total revenue per customer might dip slightly, but the strategy becomes more honest. Customers would feel better about their purchase, and that might actually improve brand trust over time. Sometimes that nudge feels fair keeps people coming back.
